October 3, 2011
Volume XXXVI, Issue 10
Cloud Computing: This Decade's Great Disruptor of Markets
Excerpted from SmartPlanet Report by Joe McKendrick
In a new post in Fortune, Aaron Levie, Founder & CEO of Box.net, says cloud computing fits the pattern of disruption first identified by Clayton Christensen in his seminal work, The Innovator's Dilemma.
That is, classic disruptors enter industries with low-end products or services targeted at the unserved or underserved markets - and work their way up from there, eventually usurping the market leader. Christensen uses examples such as Toyota, which entered the market in the 1960s with cheap little cars, or Dell in the 1990s with cheap little computers.
Now, cloud is similarly disrupting the information technology (IT) market:
"Cloud-delivered enterprise solutions fit consistently and nicely into Christensen's framework for 'disruptive innovation.' They offer cheaper, simpler, and often more broadly applicable alternatives to legacy models of enterprise computing. They tend to start out as low-end disruptors, bringing cost and performance advantages to over-served customers, but as these technologies mature in their reliability and sophistication, they're spreading throughout organizations and solving some of the most demanding problems. Christensen must be gloating."
Levie reports that there is a new generation of disruptive software providers, built on and offering cloud solutions that are rising to such disruptive roles:
"Many emerging companies are operating on dimensions that were never easy, possible, or necessary in a previous generation of software. What do all of these services have in common? They're all solving new problems that the incumbents not only can't attack, they also can't even begin to understand. But before they know it, start-ups will have pulled away significant market share as move more deeply into the enterprise."
I would like to take Levie's observations a step further.
There have been and are many start-ups that don't necessarily serve the IT sector directly, but are able to build and offer products and services via the Internet and cloud to disrupt their respective verticals.
The travel and entertainment businesses are classic examples. There is also the automobile industry, seeing effects from online dealers (CarFax) as well as new modes such as car-sharing (ZipCar).
Consulting work is being redefined by crowdsourcing approaches to solving business problems. Venture capital and funding has the potential to be reshaped by crowdfunding. Medical services are being delivered online. Entire new industries are being created in the cloud.
Clayton Christensen's paradox: responsive and responsible management creates greater lock-in.
Christensen talks about the paradox that emerges when new technologies commoditize the marketplace. Namely, that when established companies face a disruptive technology that usurps their market, management tends to get blamed for making the "wrong decisions."
However, Christensen points out, more often than not, the besieged executives actually make the right decisions - going after high-end, high-margin opportunities and leaving the low-margin commodity space for newer, disruptive companies.
In fact, as Brian Stoffel recently observed in his own analysis of the Christensen effect: "Christensen argues that great businesses fail because they get out-innovated. And oftentimes, it's not due laziness or complacency; it's because businesses listen to their customers when they shouldn't."
Thus begins a gradual death spiral as they are continually forced upstream. In essence, once companies are locked into their business models, it's difficult to move to new paradigms. And, ironically, the more responsive the management, the greater the lock-in.
Think of Digital Equipment in the 1980s and 90s, as well as Compaq. Across all product categories, the high-end brands, typically offered as part of well-crafted and expensive interdependent architectures, inevitably will lose out to more modular approaches offered by commoditizers.
Stoffel lists additional examples of low-end disruptors making their presence felt: Amazon disrupting the book market with the Kindle, and streaming video disrupting the movie-rental market. NetFlix's decision to split into two lines of business may be an attempt to disrupt its own business, he adds.
Levie has taken on a disruptor role himself. His company, Box.net, offers an online alternative to on-premises content management software packages.
Ironically, disruptors don't start off going after the customers of the big established companies - rather, they serve customers who may have never had access to such products.
As Levie put it: "Just as MySQL classically went up against Oracle without ever competing for customers, many cloud solutions today are similarly disrupting the older guard by initially slipping into the 'just good enough' category. From there, product roadmaps become more elaborate, customers are served in more meaningful ways, and before you know it just good enough becomes great, and then better."
Another example of such disruption is Salesforce.com - serving a market primarily of small to mid-sized companies that never could afford full-fledged ERP solutions. In fact, Christensen's analysis of commoditized, modular disruptor gradually creating new markets at the low end and creeping upward provides plenty to ponder within the technology space.
Enterprises Usher in Mobile Cloud Computing
Excerpted from SearchCloudComputing Report by Bill Claybrook
Mobile devices and mobile applications are changing the way IT organizations buy and use technology. Enterprise employees, not IT, are driving this trend. Even though cloud computing may facilitate end-user access to mobile apps, IT managers and developers must address a few nagging issues with mobile cloud computing.
Driven by the adoption of HTML5, increased mobile broadband coverage and the need for always-on collaborative services for the enterprise, the market for cloud-based mobile applications is expected to grow 88% from 2009 to 2014, according to Juniper Research.
More than 240 million business customers will access cloud computing services via mobile devices by 2015; and that number could jump to 998 million mobile cloud users in 2014, reported ABI Research.
In the past two years, mobile cloud computing has gained interest among a limited number of enterprises. Even though they may sound similar, mobile computing and mobile cloud computing are very different.
In traditional mobile computing environments, mobile applications run on a mobile device with the application data stored on the device. Running a mobile application has some advantages, most importantly, no latency or network bandwidth problems. But applications that run on mobile devices are generally limited in functionality and are not business-class applications.
Mobile cloud computing applications, however, run on servers that reside in the cloud. Application data also resides in the cloud and results are fed back to the mobile device over a network.
This allows users to run more robust applications. There are problems, however, such as latency and network bandwidth issues for the transfer of data between the mobile cloud and the mobile device.
There are at least two views of mobile cloud computing. One view is that of an enterprise IT organization adapting an on-premise, private cloud to connect various mobile devices such as smart-phones and iPads or tablets -- where processing and data storage is on the cloud, not the device. In this instance, an enterprise user on a mobile device would access applications running in the private cloud through the device's browser.
A second view of a mobile cloud is referred to as mass-market mobile cloud. Mass-market mobile clouds involve players we do not generally associate with traditional enterprise clouds.
These players include mobile network operators (MNOs) like AT&T, China Mobile, Vodafone, T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless, for example, as well as cross-network service providers (CNSPs). Another important component of mass-market mobile clouds is the application provider - individual, application service providers and software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers.
Please click here for the full report.
Report from CEO Marty Lafferty
 Congratulations to Ken Fadner, Jeff Loechner, and the entire MediaPost Communications team for their very successful OMMA Global Conference this week at the Marriott Marquis on Times Square in New York, NY.
Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales said in his opening keynote that he spun-off Wikia to create the same kind of passionate, community-driven content as on Wikipedia - but with advertising as a built-in way to monetize the whole proposition.
Wales emphasized that giving users control to create authentic content was a key to creating a successful online community.
Wikia generates 80,000 usage hours a day from its base of 45 million users, with 720 new wikis created daily and, most astonishing for what essentially is a non-video site, 73,000 videos uploaded to date.
Opening panel moderator Matt Straz, CEO of Namely, predicted that the web's next phase will be about blending advertising and content. What was once a compartmentalized experience - with ads on one side and content on the other - will soon be totally blended. Indeed, the web is already dominated by cloud-based offerings - Facebook, Twitter, etc. - that are pretty thoroughly blended.
Union Square Ventures founder Fred Wilson pointed to the development of ad systems in recent years that have been tailored to the kind of web service or content they're on: search ads on Google, "Likes" on Facebook, and promoted tweets on Twitter.
Wilson rattled off a dizzying array of radical digital marketing platforms that are shaking up the world as we know it. And things are going to get even more fragmented and more challenging.
"Now if you want to be an online marketer, you need to operate like you're in a NASA control room," he said. "The light at the end of the tunnel is that you'll be able to drive higher performance than advertising dating back to the early days of the web."
The new, emerging category, streaming audio, is set to explode, and will challenge the 50-year-old, $20 billion radio business. "It didn't exist five years ago," Wilson said, but this year it is estimated to have 80 million users, which will grow to 100 million next year.
And they're "not just listening to Pandora," Wilson said, citing a statistic that 73% of audio streaming users change their source several times a day.
Another big game-changer that's coming, he said, is venue-based advertising. "Foursquare now has a billion check-ins. That is a billion times someone has said I am here right now," Wilson said, noting that are more than half a million merchants on Foursquare who are "poised to do venue-based advertising."
Consumers are much more inclined to scrutinize the world around them, said Sheryl Connelly, Manager of Global Trends and Futuring at Ford Motor Company. Along with politicians and business leaders, that's making life a lot more interesting for brand marketers.
Also, regardless of tax brackets, technology is making all consumers "time poor." According to Connelly, "We all live with time poverty," which is only being exasperated by mobile, tablets, faster connection speeds, increasingly connected social experiences, and ever more rapid recommendation services.
Futurist and "cocooning"-coiner Faith Popcorn, who confided at OMMA that her Dad had been a CIA operative, discussed the notion that we're evolving so fast as a species that we're about to break-through the realm of science fiction to make things like mind-control scientific fact. Popcorn referenced a NY Times story about people can actually using their minds to move physical objects.
She cited the addiction of young media consumers to digital media - and text messaging -- as an indication that they are adapting not just culturally, but physiologically. "That is definitely DNA change," she asserted, adding, "There's going to be a whole psychiatric practice about this."
So, given the nature of the new hyper-connected consumer, how can digital marketers achieve their goals? Paul Isakson, Director of strategy at Colle+McVoy, said it's all about "designing strategies based on behavior."
MTV Networks' EVP of Digital Media Dermot McCormack recently brought back Matt Pinfield, host of MTV's alternative music program "120 Minutes" from 1995 to 1999, to help curate content. What does Pinfield have that a million tweeters and Facebook "likers" don't? In a word, "authority," said McCormack. Authority still has enormous currency in media.
McCormack said MTV Nets' new model could be viewed as a pie with three equal slices going to experts, crowds, and algorithms. "We think that's the new wheel," he added.
From tablets to smart-phones, consumers bringing their devices to bed with them has created an entirely new day-part for publishers to sell advertisers. As a result, the behavior is directly responsible for lifting engagement levels among NY Times readers, according to Denise Warren, SVP & Chief Advertising Officer at The NY Times Media Group. Grateful for the lift, Warren thanked everyone at OMMA Global who admitted to consuming content in bed.
Medialink President-COO Wenda Harris Millard discussed automobiles as the new web-connected platform, given all the mobile communications being infused behind the wheel, and noted that we may finally also be near the apocryphal digitally connected refrigerator that can call the store when you're running low on supplies.
Evan Neufeld of mobile research firm Ground Truth looked ahead to the blurring of lines between mobile web and other apps because of HTML5, though noting certain key categories like games, social media, and maps will still be tied to native apps. And another panel featuring executives from Time, Yearbook.com, and CBS Interactive, also suggested HTML5 will be making a bigger impact in mobile going forward.
Kim Kadlec, Worldwide Vice President of Global Marketing Group at Johnson & Johnson, said that these days we are communicating at such a rapid pace, we've lost our manners - which goes for people as well as brands. Moreover, we've lost the idea of courtship. We used to 'mind our Ps-and-Qs.' Now, we have to mind our tweets, our Facebook 'likes,' etc." Marketers, Kadlec suggests, would be wise to "shift from reach and frequency to reach and relationships," i.e., how they interact with consumers.
Representing a fundamental shift for Madison Avenue, relationships between media strategists and technology strategists are increasingly shaping agencies - and driving consumer engagement - according to Scott Neslund, President of digital shop Moxie. Technology is now a key agency component that didn't exist just a few years ago, Neslund said.
"Social listening," for instance, is transforming agencies, according to Neslund. What used to take the shape of focus groups - which lacked immediacy, and a certain earnestness - has evolved into something real-time, and endlessly evolving. As a result, "You are always planning," noted Laura Krajecki, Chief Consumer Officer at Starcom MediaVest Group.
Laura Krajecki said real-time response means much quicker sharing of intelligence. At the end of the day, people's lives are moving on and we are creating drag on the system by perpetuating silos.
Aitan Weinberg, Senior Product Manager at Google offered several ways to maximize marketing on Google. Remarketing complements search. "Don't let them visit your store to do comparison shopping." Use demographics to tailor every creative. "Every creative can be tailored based on demographics. One did this and saw 280% lift in click-through."
Leverage audience insight reports. You can compare demographics of people who visit different sites. You can tailor creative, bid higher or lower based on performance, or go for a blended CPA. "You have different campaigns, look at them in batch, and if you are ROI positive, keep throwing more things into the mix. As long as volume is growing and CPA is positive you are winning."
Last, understand share-of-user. Determine levers to reach everyone. Many advertisers are only reaching 5% to 10% of available users. The more you can get audience insights about size of audience the more you can achieve success. "We have seen advertisers get 3x growth."
Ashmeed Ali, Director of Mobile Insights at Yahoo, said research the company has done shows users have 34 apps on average on their mobile devices. But only four are used on a daily basis. Yahoo also found 55% of apps aren't meeting user expectations, and 43% felt their apps weren't properly organized on their phone so they couldn't easily find a particular one.
David Gill, VP, Mobile Media and Marketing for the Nielsen Company, said people are spending 55% to 60% of their time on apps because the mobile web experience is still less user-friendly.
He also pointed out that the top 50 apps in the Android Market account for 60% of usage, again reinforcing how critical it is for publishers to land in that top group of titles in Android or the App Store. The good news, from a developer standpoint, is that the top 50 titles tends to turnover fairly rapidly from month to month.
Sofia Chang, Senior Vice President - Retail Marketing at HBO, rattled off some impressive media metrics on "True Blood" sales - the drink, not the show. The soda brand sells for $3.99 a bottle, and HBO has sold nearly 2 million bottles to date. While that may not exactly be the kind of sales that will make Coca-Cola's blood curdle, it's not bad for ancillary merchandising of a premium television brand.
The live music experience is proving to be extremely sharable, said Russell Wallach, President of Live Nation Network. 65% of consumers share live music experiences via social networks; 56% upload related photos; and 31% write reviews of their overall experience.
The next step, according to Wallach, is figuring out how to bring brands into the picture in a way that feels organic and right.
Tariq Hassan, VP of Marketing of the Imaging & Printing Group at HP, was looking for digital tribalists" and Live Nation said they could deliver them. The result was an immersive concert promotion. Hassan said, "We viewed ourselves as integrating in a concert tour - not the other way around." Regarding the partnership, Wallach said: "The learning was the way you're able to integrate a brand into in show that's truly organic."
"The business has changed more in the last five years than it has in the previous 25 years," OMMA moderator and Goodby, Silverstein & Partners' Curator of Pop Culture Barbara Lippert said, paraphrasing her boss Jeff Goodby.
"To the point that we don't know what advertising is, what an agency is. It's all being reformed as we speak."
"We get into these violent debates about whether we should even use this word 'agency,'" Gaston Legorburu, Worldwide Chief Creative Director, SapientNitro, said, adding, "We have to think much more expansively. Are we consultants, are we an agency, are we a technology company?"
There are two types of ad creatives, according to Mike Monello, Partner and Chief Creative Officer at Campfire: those who focus on the process of creating the work, and those who focus on the impact that their work has on audiences. According to Monello, the latter is destined to succeed. The notion of creatives as filmmakers is all wrong. Rather, the successful creative approaches his or her work like an architect - creating things that will be used and "lived in."
Online still doesn't deliver the emotional impact of TV, Alan Schulman, Chairman, Chief Creative Officer, U.DIG, acknowledged during the closing panel Tuesday focused on digital creative. "We creatively, haven't made the web make you feel," said Schulman. "Algorithms don't feel, people do."
He said the web still has to find a way to provide the "lean back" experience of TV to really connect with people in the same way. So much for lean-forward interaction, which OMMA attendees did during two days of extremely valuable insights. Share wisely, and take care.
Why Agencies Should Not Act More like Start-Ups
Excerpted from Online Spin Report by Matt Straz
"Agencies should act more like tech start-ups," a recent article in Fast Company proclaimed. The basic argument was that agencies needed to embrace the culture of creating software to remain relevant. Having worked at both a large media agency as well as a small software start-up, I don't agree. Here's why:
Agencies are the start-ups that have made it. In the late 1960s, at the height of advertising's creative revolution, ad agencies were the start-ups of their day. Jerry Della Femina, the infamous New York creative director and one of the original Mad Men, estimated that back then up to 200 ad agencies were started each year. Like today's start-ups, only a handful would ultimately make it.
Flash-forward a couple of decades to advertising's next revolution, the rise of the media agencies, and the start-ups were the new planning and buying agencies. Whether it was Irwin Gottlieb in New York forming what today is known as MediaVest or Chris Ingram in London building CIA (now the "C" in MEC), media was the hot place to be in advertising.
The creative and media shops that made it are now decades old. To think that these successful, mature businesses are now going to behave like adolescent companies blowing through cash and changing their business model every month is as improbable as it is impossible.
Agencies make for lousy software companies. With the possible exception of Avenue A giving birth to the ad server Atlas, the record of agencies developing and then supporting a great software product is mostly unblemished by success.
The reason isn't that people at agencies don't have good ideas for products. They know better than many entrepreneurs what software the marketing industry actually needs. After all, it was Irwin Gottlieb who taught himself how to program in Fortran in 1973 so he could build modeling software for his agency.
The problem is that most agencies aren't structured to develop software. Software companies require years of funding before they can turn a profit. Agencies must make a profit consistently or they will go out of business. The big agency holding companies measure their agencies on the compensation they pay to employees versus the revenue they bring in from clients. If that ratio gets too far out of whack, heads will roll.
Even if an agency carves out a special budget for software development, often it doesn't have the flexibility to maintain the product. Winning and keeping accounts is essential to an agency and takes up management bandwidth. Wooing software engineers often depends on being able to offer stock options. Mature agencies typically don't have the kind of time and resources available to then continually improve a tech product.
Clients make for lousy agencies. Marketers long ago accepted that it's not possible to have all the necessary expertise in-house, whether it's in creative, media, or social. Just as an agency can't become a software company, a marketer can't become an agency. There are too many structural and financial impediments to make that happen at any kind of scale.
Agencies are more important than ever. The pace of change in media is faster than it has ever been. A couple of years ago it appeared that every marketer should be building a mobile WAP site. This year is all about social platforms.
What does the recent Facebook product release mean to marketers? Should clients continue to embrace Twitter? What about Foursquare, Google+ or Tumblr? These kinds of questions are best answered by the people working at the intersection of marketing and technology: namely, the people who work at agencies.
Agencies provide a service that is more valuable today than ever before.
BitTorrent Offers Tech to Decongest ISPs' Networks
Excerpted from CNET News Report by Stephen Shankland
BitTorrent, a company that's enabled network-crushing levels of file sharing, can be seen as Internet service providers' (ISPs') natural opponent. But the company's chief executive today entered the lion's den with a surprising message:
"I'm actually here to help."
How? In a speech at the Broadband World Forum here, BitTorrent CEO Eric Klinker tried to build enthusiasm for his company's Micro Transport Protocol, or uTP, an open-source technology that's built into the company's client software for sharing files over peer-to-peer (P2P) connections. uTP increases network efficiency and addresses congestion - the biggest concern that ISPs raised a few years ago during the heated network neutrality debates, Klinker said.
Much data today is sent over the Internet with the Transmission Control Protocol, or TCP, but Klinker argued that its method of finding out when there are congestion troubles is too little, too late. TCP breaks information down into numerous individually addressed packets that are reassembled at the other end of the network link, monitoring constantly for packets that fail to arrive.
"TCP detects congestion based on lost packets," Klinker said. "This is a lot like driving your car through a school zone and only slowing down after you've struck your first pedestrian."
In contrast, uTP detects congestion earlier and steps out of the way when it discovers a problem, Klinker said.
"It was designed in its philosophy to yield to traffic," Klinker said. "uTP will no longer be the cause of any congestion on the Internet because of these mechanisms."
And avoiding congestion lowers ISP costs, he argued. "If we could somehow tackle the network congestion problem, we end up tackling the network cost issue," he said.
Of course, he also predicted more data coming to the Net. "The Internet is going to evolve, to continue its development as a multimedia network. That means a lot more big files," he said.
Here, though, he thinks BitTorrent has a role to play by helping people transfer information from all the digital cameras and other devices that can easily produce gigabytes of data.
"You'll see us roll out applications that help liberate media from those devices and share it with family and friends," he said.
"The content has no value until it's shared and seen. That's hard for today's networks. The devices at the edge of the network seem to miraculously increase in capability, but the networks don't seem to change."
SMB Demand for In-Cloud Solutions Is on the Rise
Excerpted from CRM Magazine Report
Small and midsized businesses are showing increasing demand for mobile and cloud-based applications, given that more than half of their employees work outside the office, according to new research from Fonality and Webtorials.
Other findings presented in the "State of the Market 2011 Report: Mobility Trends in SMBs," include the increased use of tablet computers, which report authors expect to become the standard mobile device within 18 months. In addition, due to increasing mobile dependence, 43% of SMBs plan to deploy cloud-based or hosted mobile solutions to improve delivery to employees.
"SMBs are relying on mobile tools to better serve customers and reduce capex," said Joanie Wexler, an independent networking analyst and editor in Silicon Valley. "However, employees are struggling with inconsistent access experiences when inside and outside the office, which can be a productivity-buster. Companies with highly mobile-centric employees that invest in solutions enabling consistent access can recoup a lot of worker time, and this study shows that cloud/hosted services are emerging as a primary way of achieving those goals."
Additional details from the report include the following: real-time presence as well as corporate directory and calendar access are favored unified communications (UC) capabilities; contact center functionality, including customer escalation, skills-based routing, and queue management,are an increasingly high priority; and Wi-Fi connectivity is a preferred method to preserve mobile plan minutes.
As a call-to-action, the study states that mobile workers who spend hours in the field experience difficulty accessing critical business applications, which in turn, burns productivity. This productivity loss is up to six hours per week of wasted time per SMB employee.
By providing the same business communications experience inside and outside the office, an average firm consisting of 137 employees with 67 mobile workers can recoup up to $700,000 annually in measurable staff productivity gains, or more than $10,000 per mobile employee.
"This study reveals that the mobile workforces of today's growing businesses have been artificially inhibited by legacy technologies," said Wes Durow, Chief Marketing Officer at Fonality. "SMBs now have access to cloud-based unified communications and contact center features that fully enable remote workers in a simple and affordable manner."
Seeking Safety in Clouds
Excerpted from Wall St. Journal Report by John Bussey
You are a small or medium-sized business, a data anchovy in a sea of hacker sharks eager to make you their lunch.
What can you do - and how can you afford - to keep your data secure?
Ever-more fearful of cyberattcks, small and medium-size companies, the biggest chunk of US enterprise, are starting to outsource their security to protect valuable files from hacking.
An increasing number of smaller firms are opting to school for protection, off site and, they hope, out of sight of the sharks.
Outsourcing data storage and software operations to an IT management firm is finally catching on in the small and medium-sized business world, which accounts for the vast majority of companies in the US.
IT service providers have been around for years, used mostly by big companies. Now, smaller firms are biting too, attracted chiefly by cost savings and service but increasingly by security as well.
It's a nervous first bite, though, and just the beginning of a trend in a realm better known by its buzz phrase: "cloud computing," or running operations and storing data on someone else's servers, and then accessing it from office or home via the Internet.
"We're definitely having more conversations about security with small and medium-sized customers, and we're also selling more security services to those customers than ever before," says John Engates, Chief Technology Officer at Rackspace, a cloud host. "It's on the rise." In Europe, too, big cloud providers are targeting mid-sized companies and making security a pitch point, says Boston Consulting Group.
Driving the migration to the cloud: rapid growth in cloud services and options; ever-larger economies of scale pushed down to the small guy; and now the spike in big and little companies getting hacked, and concerns about data security and business continuity.
Eric Cooper has 150 employees and 5,000 volunteers working for him at the San Antonio Food Bank. He wanted to secure the nonprofit's donor list and complex supplier network, among other issues. To get those safeguards, he needed an operating system "well above our technological and intellectual capacity," he says. So he outsourced the food bank's IT needs to a cloud provider. "It was a no-brainer. I can't be worried about whether there's someone hacking our system."
Basic security tasks that often don't get done at a small enterprise - updating antivirus programs or applying patches to software - are usually part of the plain-vanilla package in the cloud. The more you pay, the more you get: firewalls around your data, high-end encryption, "private clouds" that let you isolate critical information and still access extra processing muscle when you need it, hacker-attack notification and mitigation, and 24-hour tech support.
"Small and medium businesses are insane not to leverage the advantages of cloud computing," says Jim Reavis of Cloud Security Alliance, an industry group. "It ends up being almost in all cases a security upgrade because they can't otherwise afford the practices."
The sheer size of cloud businesses like Amazon's Amazon Web Services, says a company spokeswoman, "allows significantly more investment in security policing and countermeasures than almost any company, large or small, could afford themselves."
But the cloud is no Fort Knox and can cut both ways on security. Multiple users of a given server can create multiple entry points for hackers. If the cloud provider's security is weak and if basic Internet hygiene is sloppy at businesses whose files cohabitate with yours, then you may get infected too. Hackers also love multiple targets in one setting, which the cloud provides. A cloud host could actually make your data more vulnerable.
In fact, when the tech-research group IDC asked businesses in 2008 what factors were most likely to discourage their use of cloud computing, 72% of small businesses (defined as having fewer than 100 employees) and 63% of mid-sized companies (100 to 999 employees) said security was their chief worry.
But here's the trend: By mid-2011, those numbers had dropped to 50% and 47%, respectively. Companies are rethinking cloud security, says Ray Boggs, of IDC. At the beginning of 2010, about 7% of small companies and 17% of mid-sized companies said they had some cloud activity. Just 18 months later, the numbers had doubled to 13% and 36%, respectively. "And the trend continues," Mr. Boggs says.
Blake Brown, whose company Shibuminet in Pensacola, FL, employs one person, straddles the two worlds. Half of his business is building websites. He uses Rackspace cloud services for that. "They have a level of support I wouldn't have, or don't want to learn," along with "security I get from them by default," he says.
The other half has him serving as the tech guy for about 20 small and mid-sized businesses - lawyers, financial advisers, retailers - that still want to keep tech in-house.
Mr. Brown believes that over time these sorts of companies will gravitate to cloud computing, particularly when they start giving employees remote access from home that opens new doors to their files.
And the tipping point for making that transition? Pain, he says - when a shark gets through and disrupts the business.
Happy Cloud Teams up with AMD for Connected TV Games
Excerpted from GamesBeat Report by Dean Takahashi
Cloud-gaming firm Happy Cloud plans to work with Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) to bring games-on-demand to connected TVs.
Under the partnership, Happy Cloud will give users access to Windows-based PC games via web-connected TVs that use AMD's embedded G-Series microprocessors. Those chips combine graphics and a processor on a single chip, allowing TVs that use them to run thousands of high-quality Windows games. If it takes off, the console makers will have more cloud-based competition.
"You can get movies, TV shows, and music on demand straight to your TV," said Eric Gastfriend, Vice President and General Manager at Happy Cloud. "Why not videogames? It used to be that you needed a gaming console and a trip to the store to get a new game." Now you can get them via the Internet, downloading them not only to a PC, but also to a connected TV.
Like streaming firms OnLive and Gaikai, Happy Cloud delivers game to customers almost instantly. But in contrast to those rivals, Cambridge, MA based Happy Cloud doesn't rely solely on streaming. Rather, Happy Cloud uses progressive downloading. It installs a playable version of a game on your machine (or in this case, a TV) within a couple of minutes of purchasing the game. Then the rest of the game downloads in the background while you play.
Instead of waiting hours, you can start enjoying the game much earlier. And by the end of the process, the complete game is downloaded to your machine. That way, there is no need for constant streaming, as with Gaikai or OnLive. There is also no risk of lag, or slowdowns related to bad Internet connections, as there is with streaming, Gastfriend said.
The solution allows users to access games on demand from the open web, or, in this case, Happy Cloud's web site. The solution gives TV makers and set-top box makers a new source for game revenues and a new service to offer their customers.
Happy Cloud will be part of the set-top box (STB) reference design (or standard system) for AMD-based connected-TV platforms, said Buddy Broeker, Director of Embedded Solutions at AMD.
Happy Cloud opened its online game store in July, allowing users to quickly play games that could take as much as 15 hours to fully download on digital download sites such as Steam. The company uses a virtualized file system pre-installed and pre-packaged on the network, eliminating download and installation delays normally required by high-end PC games. This tricks the game into thinking that it has been fully installed. Then Happy Cloud uses intelligent branching and caching algorithms to figure out what to download next.
Developers don't need to modify their source code or provide demo builds to be used with Happy Cloud. Publishers can offer the Happy Cloud solution as a white-label service (one that carries the publishers' own brand name on their own web sites).
Happy Cloud has 10 employees in Cambridge, MA and Beit Shemesh, Israel. It was founded in 2009 by brothers Jacob and David Guedalia and it has raised money from Jesselson Capital and Miles Guilburne, a former AOL executive. The company has raised $1 million to date. Happy Cloud is the Guedalias' sixth company. They sold their last startup, i-Skoot, to Qualcomm in October.
Besides Gaikai and Onlive, rivals include GameTree TV, Playcast, Steam, Spoon, GameStop, GameTap, Exent, Electronic Arts, and Wal-Mart. Services such as GameTap and Exent often require that 50 percent of the game be downloaded before playing, whereas Happy Cloud cuts the time until you can play by 90 to 95%.
Happy Cloud had more than 2,500 visitors to its site in its private beta, before it opened the site to the public in July. For a typical 8.5-gigabyte (DVD-size) game, the download time for Happy Cloud is just two minutes on a 20-megabit-per-second connection. Typically, that would take more than an hour on a normal download, not counting installation time. On a 4-megabit-per-second connection, it takes 10.5 minutes on Happy Cloud and 4.8 hours-plus on a normal download. With Happy Cloud, you can play demos for free.
Happy Cloud uses Akamai's content delivery network (CDN) in addition to its own proprietary technology for fast delivery of games. If a transmission is interrupted, you can resume the download at the same point at any time. You also use your own hard disk drive space to store games. Happy Cloud doesn't yet work on Macs. The disadvantage of Happy Cloud is that you can only play it on a machine capable of handling the download.
Gen Y Embraces Smaller Screens for TV and Online Video Viewing
Excerpted from eMarketer Report
Although over-the-top (OTT) video usage continues to surge across age groups, younger consumers are leading the charge in online video streaming and mobile video viewing.
Surpassing their older counterparts in OTT activity, members of Generation Y in particular are displaying an aptitude for alternative methods for viewing television and movies.
According to online research provider Knowledge Networks, 56% of Gen Y Internet users stream video on a weekly basis - twice as many as among boomers. Gen Y is also four times more likely to watch video via mobile than boomers.
Although the 13-to-31 age group may be leading the charge, digital video viewing is increasing among web users of all ages. Knowledge Networks research indicates that monthly use of an alternative method for movie and television viewing increased from 26% in 2010 to 35% in 2011. Use of streaming video rental services has doubled since 2010, and so has video viewing via Internet-connected video game consoles and on mobile devices.
A Nielsen survey supports some of the Knowledge Networks demographics findings. According to Nielsen, consumers ages 18 to 49 watch more than twice as much television content on the Internet as those older than 50. Gen Y and Gen X males are especially heavy Internet video users, watching more than 7 hours a month. When it comes to mobile, males and females ages 18 to 49 watch roughly the same amount of video on their mobile devices, about 4 hours, surpassing those older than 50, who watch 2 to 3 hours of mobile video a month.
comScore data provides a contrast, indicating that more males than females watch mobile video content, regardless of time spent. According to comScore, 62% of males viewed mobile TV or video in June 2011, compared to 38% of females. comScore's generational data largely lines up with that of Knowledge Networks, and adoption by consumers older than 45 makes up only a sliver of overall usage. The majority of mobile TV and video viewers are younger than 44.
Marketers should take note of the 18-to-34 age group as a sweet spot for over-the-top video marketing. As online and mobile video content continues to proliferate, consumer usage of alternative viewing channels will continue to climb. eMarketer predicts that by 2015, 76% of Internet users, or 195.5 million people, will watch video content online each month.
John Jenkins: A Head for the Cloud
Business Connexion is very quickly becoming synonymous with cloud service provision in South Africa. That's because since 2006 - before the term "cloud computing" came into the lingua franca - the company was already investing in the foundational infrastructure to enable the on-demand services it provides to industry and government today.
And behind that vision are the people who make Business Connexion the company that it is, reflected in its "Connective Intelligence" concept, which defines the combination of human nous with technological excellence.
Among the company's key people is John Jenkins, who has recently been appointed as an Executive Director to the Boards of Business Connexion Group and Business Connexion, and ascended to the position of Group Executive: Business Development - Private Sector.
This is a significant step forward for Jenkins, and reflects the growing importance of the concept of cloud computing, especially for the company's clients in the private sector. In his preceding roles, both at Business Connexion and prior to joining the company, Jenkins has established himself as a leader of some distinction in the information and communication technology (ICT) services industry. His experience spans deal making, contract structuring, service management and multi-sourcing arrangements.
But it is specifically in the areas of ICT outsourcing and managed services that Jenkins is recognized as a pre-eminent voice. Indeed, he is considered one of the founders of the outsourcing industry in South Africa, and as such, is a widely recognized consultant, coach, and mentor, drawing on over three decades of experience in the IT industry.
Cloud computing and services on demand represent the contemporary pinnacle of outsourced managed services. These concepts are rapidly achieving widespread recognition of their validity for the cost- and efficiency-optimized delivery of ICT to meet the requirements of business. However, for many companies there remain questions and concerns around whether or not cloud computing and services on demand can meet their stringent requirements for reliability, availability and performance, on the one hand, and security on the other.
That's where Jenkins' past experience and leadership positions him ideally for his present role. Over the past five years, he has played an instrumental role in elevating Business Connexion's pivotal Services division to a leadership position within the South African - and indeed, African - markets.
These are markets that are contested by global competitors; it is through Jenkins' vision, understanding of salient strategy and anticipation of the cloud computing phenomenon that Business Connexion has assumed its market position.
Driving successful cloud strategies for private enterprise today is not just a technologically astute strategy. It is also emerging as a necessity to operate a cost-effective and highly responsive organization. From private cloud to private/public cloud infrastructures, it is among Jenkins' key priorities to advance the business case for cloud strategies in the private sector.
As he takes responsibility for developing new business, ensuring collaboration, integration and alignment across divisions, Jenkins is positioning Business Connexion for significant organic growth with the experience, expertise, and track record to lead the collective efforts of the company.
Mandl Says Cloud Computing to Drive More Technology M&A
Excerpted from Washington Post Report
Eric Mandl, a Senior Managing Director at Evercore Partners and Scott Sperling, Co-President of Thomas H. Lee Partners, talk about mergers and acquisitions in the technology and telecommunications industries. They talk with Pimm Fox on Bloomberg Television's "Taking Stock."
Steve Jobs Talked About Cloud Computing in 1997
Excerpted from Business Insider Report by Dylan Love
It has more or less become passe to call Steve Jobs a visionary, but it never fails to surprise us just how forward thinking he's always been.
Check out this video from 1997 where he gives an impromptu talk on cloud computing - "Never have I seen something more powerful than this computation combined with this network that we now have. In the last 7 years, do you know how many times I've lost any personal data? Zero. Do you know how many times I've backed up my computer? Zero.
Please click here to screen the video.
Coming Events of Interest
Digital Music Forum West - October 5th-6th in Los Angeles. CA. Top music, technology, and policy leaders come together for high-level discussions and debate, intimate meetings, and unrivaled networking about the future of digital music. Digital Music Forum is known worldwide.
Digital Hollywood Fall - October 17th-20th in Marina del Rey, CA. Digital Hollywood (DH), the premier entertainment and technology conference in the country, once again welcomes the Variety Summit, which has been co-located with its past three DH events.
Future of Film Summit - November 7th-8th in Los Angeles, CA. An exclusive group of industry thought-leaders discuss the current state of the industry, and how film and transmedia deals will be struck in the coming years. This is a unique opportunity for creatives, producers, buyers, and film financiers.
Streaming Media West - November 8th-9th in Los Angeles, CA. Attended by more than 2,500 executives last year, SMW covers the entire online video ecosystem from content creation and management, to monetization and distribution. The number-one place to come see, learn, and discuss what is taking place with all forms of online video business models and technology.
World Telecom Summit 2011 - November 9th-11th in Singapore. The 2011 program will focus on topics that demonstrate innovation across the telecommunications industry, both on a commercial and technical level, to improve profitability and quality of next generation technologies and customer experiences.
Future of Television - November 17th-18th in New York, NY. Top television and digital media industry executives discuss the increasing importance digital media for the future of the television industry. Topics include viewer trends; programming for non-traditional platforms including online video, VoD, HD, IPTV, broadband and mobile.
2012 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) - January 10th-13th in Las Vegas, NV. With more than four decades of success, the International CES reaches across global markets, connects the industry and enables CE innovations to grow and thrive. This is the world's largest consumer technology tradeshow.
CONTENT IN THE CLOUD at CES - January 11th in Las Vegas, NV. Gain a deeper understanding of the impact of cloud-delivered content on specific segments and industries, including consumers, telecom, media, and CE manufacturers.
|
